Own Subtitles?

[the_unknown_cell]

Is there a tool to create own subtitle files ? because i want to create own subtitles with a certain movie file

[kaitsuburi]

Hi

Sub Station Alpha (http://www.eswat.demon.co.uk/) (the link off Kotus's site is down -- search Google for mirrors) and SubResync from the Vobsub package (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Subtitles/VobSub_2.23.exe) and Notepad do the job perfectly for me. More tools are available if you want to do output "proper" subtitles to DVD.

Good luck!

-kaitsuburi

[the_unknown_cell]

Hi , i downloaded SSA , but it doesn't make sense what to do with it , i can't open my movie file , so how should i sub it then?

[kaitsuburi]

IMHO, the most useful feature of SSA is timing from WAV files. It is extremely precise and you can get all the dialogue covered this way. For other non-dialogue subtitles, you can get the timings from previewing with Virtual Dub and add them to the SSA script using notepad later.

The super-annoying part about WAV files in SSA is that you need the soundtrack in 8-bit mono. It says any sampling rate is fine, but that is not true; I've spent over an hour experimenting to get a WAV file that would open in SSA. The magic combination for getting a working WAV file for me was using VirtualDubMod 1.5.1.1a. (I tried even SoundForge, same settings as VDubMod, but it didn't work)

In VDubMod, choose the audio stream you want in Streams->StreamsList; right-click, choose full-processing; then under "Compression" choose "no compression" and under "Conversion" choose 8-bit, 16000Hz, mono. Then click on SaveWAV and it will convert the track for you. If you only have a non-muxed track, you can open a dummy file in VDubMod, add a stream and then convert it.

Once you have the wav, start SSA, go to Timing->Time From WAV File, click on Open, get your file and you're set. (NB. You don't need to open your movie file) The controls are very nifty -- Left Mouse Button for Start (Yellow line); Right Mouse Button for End (Red line) of your selection. After previewing with Play Selected, you can adjust the selection (i.e. duration for subtitle line) very precisely, then you click on Grab Times and move on. It's very easy.

I personally don't like entering text in SSA because I do a lot of subtitles in Japanese and SSA has the nasty habit of cutting off double-byte characters in preview. SSA is awesome for timings though and preview is fine in English I believe.

Once you generate a SSA script with the timings, open it up in Notepad or another text editor and you can define styles, change positioning and basically make it look good, previewing in VDubMod (F5) after you've loaded your SSA file in an Avisynth script through textsub(). Use SubResync to convert to Unicode, etc. and also to help you with styles (read VobSub's documentation).

This should get you started. There are a lot of people here more experienced than me in SSA who might answer more specific questions you might have.

-kaitsuburi

[DeKSoft]

Or you can also use Subtitle Workshop (http://urusoft.cjb.net).

[Ghim]

I worked on subtitles for a while and here's my advice :

I think SSA gives better results and is easy to use...
WAV timing is really faster and more precise than video timing and there's only a very few softwares capable of WAV timing like SSA...
You can create and use different styles with ssa and that's pretty cool too...
(video timing is only needed if you want to translate a title or something else visual but in this case SSA+Vdub+Notepad is the best tools combination)

You can add also a lot of special effects thanks to ASS specifications, but I don't think you'll need them
The only thing you should be carefull with is the resolution matter in SSA settings... If you edit subtitles on 1 computer, no pb... But if you use more computers, you should be carefull and use the same resolution settings with SubStation Alpha. (But I don't think it'll be very usefull if you just begin...)

[ppera2]

Try Subtitle Translator - it has built in player, and you can insert times for titles by mouse or key click (configurable in latest version).